SACW - 10 June 2014 | Pakistan: terrorists attack Karachi Airport / India: Hindutva-capitalism takes power ; Protect Constitutional and Democratic Rights / Madness / Washington’s Iron Curtain In Ukraine

[Harsh Kapoor]

South Asia Citizens Wire - 10 June 2014 - No. 2824 
[since 1996]
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Contents:
1. Pakistan: Civil society condemns terrorists attack on Karachi Airport
2. Joint Statement by Pakistan citizens groups, on the Invitation to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to attend Modi's oath-taking Ceremony 
3. PIPFPD India welcomes Pakistan Prime Minister attending the swearing in ceremony of Narendra Modi, Indian Prime Minister designate, on May 26, 2014
4. Babar Ayaz: Secularism and conflict management in Pakistan
5. Minority and the mob: Pakistan's deathwish hatred is the Ahmadi community
6. India: Can NaMo do a Harper | Subhash Gatade
7. Them Again in India | Chetan Bhatt
8. Gandhi on secular law and state | Anil Nauriya
9. India's Nuclear Doctrine: Up for a Makeover? | Sukla Sen
10. India administered Kashmir and the Article 370 - Select articles
11. India: Maharashtra police to crack whip on those who ‘like' offensive Facebook posts
12. India: Another publisher forced to censor textbooks
13. India: Protect our Constitutional and Democratic Rights to Free Speech and Expression — Statement by Concerned Citizens
14. India where sexual violence is now part of our new normal | Ratna Kapur
15. India: Badaun Outrage - Preliminary Report of a Fact-finding Team
16. India: Statement by concerned IT professionals from Pune following hate crime by Hindu Rashtra Sena
17. India: Assault by Rajasthan Government on the leading Gandhian Institution, the Rajasthan Samagra Sewa Sangh - Statement by Concerned Citizens
18. Prominent Indian singer Shubha Mudgal intimidated and threatened in California - Statement by SAHMAT
19. Video of Zohra Segal : Celebrating her 101st birhday | Women Speak Channel by Anhad
20. Draft Statement at Third ITUC World Congress 18-23 May 2014, Berlin
21. A Nightmare Materialises In India: Hindutva-capitalism takes power | Praful Bidwai
22. Sandeep Bhushan - How the television news industry scripted the Indian elections
23. “Worse than Reagan”: Meet the violent chauvinist now leading India, Narendra Modi | Elias Isquith
24. India: Statement on 2014 General Elections by People's Alliance for Democracy and Secularism (P.A.D.S.)
25. India: Boko Harami's and Nigerian crisis - A Discussion on Rajya Sabha TV

::: FULL TEXT :::
26. Pakistan: A vigilante state & society | Babar Sattar
27. India: Resisting Modi through mass struggles | Praful Bidwai
28. India: The 'Discreet Charm' of the BJP | Sumanta Banerjee
29. India: BJP's emerging structure of power | Ranabir Samaddar
30. Jordan Piper's Review of Andrew T. Scull. Madness: A Very Short Introduction
31. Pakistan: Worse Than We Knew | Ahmed Rashid
32. Tightening The U.S. Grip On Western Europe: Washington’s Iron Curtain In Ukraine | Diana Johnstone

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1. PAKISTAN: CIVIL SOCIETY CONDEMNS TERRORISTS ATTACK ON KARACHI AIRPORT
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The Pakistan Peace Coalition [PPC], Pakistan Civil Society Forum Sindh Chapter and Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research [PILER] have vehemently condemned the terrorists attack at the Karachi Airport Sunday night, which continued till Monday afternoon, resulting in deaths of 18 personnel of law enforcement agencies including Airport Security Force, Rangers and Police, as well as killing of 10 terrorists.
In a joint statement, the civil society organizations regretted the loss of lives of personnel deployed at the Airport who fell victim to the terrorists’ offence against the biggest airport of the country.
http://www.sacw.net/article8879.html

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2. JOINT STATEMENT BY PAKISTAN CITIZENS GROUPS, ON THE INVITATION TO PRIME MINISTER NAWAZ SHARIF TO ATTEND MODI'S OATH-TAKING CEREMONY
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Coming as it does in the wake of India's invitation to Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif to attend the oath-taking ceremony of Narendra Modi as the new Prime Minister of India in New Delhi on 26th May, Pakistan Foreign Office spokesperson's statement re-iterating that “Pakistan wants uninterrupted and uninterruptible dialogue with India to resolve all the issues, including the core issue of Jammu and Kashmir', and the assertion that “It will be a mistake to let this opportunity go; we need to see beyond today”, is most welcome.
http://sacw.net/article8759.html

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3. PIPFPD INDIA WELCOMES PAKISTAN PRIME MINISTER ATTENDING THE SWEARING IN CEREMONY OF 
NARENDRA MODI, INDIAN PRIME MINISTER DESIGNATE, ON MAY 26, 2014
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http://www.sacw.net/article8784.html

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4. BABAR AYAZ: SECULARISM AND CONFLICT MANAGEMENT IN PAKISTAN
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One school of thought wants to prove that Islam gives space to establish a secular polity, while the other says that it does not because Islam gives a complete code of life which includes the management of the state under ‘Sharia'
http://www.sacw.net/article8834.html

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5. MINORITY AND THE MOB: PAKISTAN'S DEATHWISH HATRED IS THE AHMADI COMMUNITY
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Nations trapped in the cycle of fate can't resist a recurrent deathwish even when they know it is a deathwish. Turks can't live down their primal hatred of Armenians, and become Turks only when they collectively hate them. Iranians have the same kind of emotion about the Bahai. Once Germans hated Jews and killed a lot of them to post their “greatness” to the world. Pakistan's deathwish hatred is against the Ahmadi community. It lives as a nation only if it kills Ahmadis and ceases to be a nation if it stops killing them.
Pakistan's “greatness” as a nation was asserted soon after it had its first real constitution, in 1973. The second amendment inserted into it — to remove the “flaw” of the original text — apostatised the Ahmadi community, a sect which controversially thought its founder a “prophet without a book”.
http://www.sacw.net/article8864.html

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6. INDIA: CAN NAMO DO A HARPER
by Subhash Gatade
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All those people who are familiar with the stigmatisation and terrorisation of a people and a community in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 attack can recount many such stories of miscarriage of justice, innocents being lodged in jail for years together and the tragedies which befell their families. The case of Mahel Arar was unique in many ways in the sense that because of the tremendous uproar in the Canadian society over this issue, Stephen Harper, then Prime Minister of Canada sought public apology for the ordeal which Maher went through and for the role played by Canadian officials in the whole affair. All the six were arrested for their alleged support to the terrorists who died in the Akshardham terror attack. It was September 25, 2002 and the famous Akshardham temple in Ahmedabad came under attack. It is time that PM Narendra Modi, decides to do a Harper.
http://www.sacw.net/article8795.html

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7. THEM AGAIN IN INDIA
by Chetan Bhatt
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Given the emphatic victory of Narendra Modi and the BJP in the recent Indian elections, should secularists, human rights activists, liberals, feminists be worried? While the BJP win is based on about 31% of the popular vote, the democratic mandate by the Indian electorate is a powerful one and, for the first time in its history, the BJP can govern India without being unduly constrained by coalition partners. How can secularists and human rights activists oppose this kind of democratic mandate?
http://www.sacw.net/article8794.html

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8. GANDHI ON SECULAR LAW AND STATE | Anil Nauriya
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Gandhi and Nehru had differences. But they had strong mutual synergies on vital issues.
http://www.sacw.net/article8785.html

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9. INDIA'S NUCLEAR DOCTRINE: UP FOR A MAKEOVER?
by Sukla Sen
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The Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the then main opposition party in India and widely tipped to emerge as the largest party in India's sixteenth parliamentary election, released its election manifesto 1 in New Delhi on April 7 last, the day the nine-phase election stretching from April 7 to May 12 commenced. . . . the page 39 of the 42-page document has attracted attentions of the commentators, both within the country and also abroad. Never mind that the issue is really not a hot topic in this election. The section is captioned: 'Independent Strategic Nuclear Programme'. Evidently, the issue dealt with therein explains the extent of interest, in certain limited circles, triggered by it.
http://www.sacw.net/article8780.html

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10. INDIA ADMINISTERED KASHMIR AND THE ARTICLE 370 - SELECT ARTICLES
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Following the victory in 2014 elections will the Narendra Modi led govt. move to alter the nature of the relationship India has with Kashmir and modify the article 370 of the Indian constitution. A selection of articles from the Indian media are posted below to understand the issues involved.
http://sacw.net/article8819.html

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11. INDIA: MAHARASHTRA POLICE TO CRACK WHIP ON THOSE WHO ‘LIKE' OFFENSIVE FACEBOOK POSTS
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In an attempt to contain protests over objectionable posts on a social networking site about Chhatrapati Shivaji, Dr Babasaheb Ambedkar and the late Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray, the Maharashtra police have decided to take action even against those who 'like' the controversial posts.
http://www.sacw.net/article8831.html

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12. INDIA: ANOTHER PUBLISHER FORCED TO CENSOR TEXTBOOKS
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Another case filed by the Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti (SBAS) against a textbook published a decade ago has resulted in Orient Blackswan (OBS) — a publisher specialising in academic books — undertaking a pre-release assessment of books that might attract similar reaction.
http://www.sacw.net/article8820.html

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13. INDIA: PROTECT OUR CONSTITUTIONAL AND DEMOCRATIC RIGHTS TO FREE SPEECH AND EXPRESSION — STATEMENT BY CONCERNED CITIZENS
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No democracy can claim to be one, unless freedom of speech and expression are guaranteed by statute and where the state machinery works to ensure compliance not only in the behavior of government, but of its citizens. The curbing of expression with threat and through terror, increasingly more menacing, should be condemned and stopped, if our country is to become a mature democracy. Indeed, the expression of varied and differing opinions strengthen the political discourse and empowers people to make informed choices. In the last fortnight there has been a resurgence of attacks to curb the right to free speech and expression of Indian citizens who did not share the euphoria, hope and enthusiasm associated with recent election results.
http://sacw.net/article8827.html

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14. INDIA WHERE SEXUAL VIOLENCE IS NOW PART OF OUR NEW NORMAL | Ratna Kapur
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The brutal rape and lynching of two girls in Badaun should shock the collective conscience of all Indians, regardless of their class, caste, religious or ethnic background. But does it?
http://sacw.net/article8841.html

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15. INDIA: BADAUN OUTRAGE - PRELIMINARY REPORT OF A FACT-FINDING TEAM
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A fact-finding team, comprising Rajan Singh (Actionaid), Ram Kumar (Dynamic Action Group), Ramdular (National Campaign for Dalit Human Rights—NCdhr), Neetu (Humsafar Support Centre for Women), Shubhangi Singh (AALI) and Shilpi Aggraval (SAKAR Sanstha, Bareilly), visited Katra Sahadatganj village in Dattaganj Block in UP’s Badaun district where the abduction, gang rape and murder of two minor girls allegedly by three brothers Pappu Yadav, Avdesh Yadav, Urvesh Yadav, sons of Vir Yadav, and two police constables Sarvesh Yadav and Chatra Pal on May 27, 2014 night rocked the country. This is a preliminary report of the fact-finding team. A detailed report is being worked upon and would be ready in a few days.
http://www.sacw.net/article8880.html

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16. INDIA: STATEMENT BY CONCERNED IT PROFESSIONALS FROM PUNE FOLLOWING HATE CRIME BY HINDU RASHTRA SENA
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We, the undersigned express our deep shock at the gruesome incident of hate crime reported in the city of Pune earlier this week. A 28 year old IT professional Shaikh Mohsin Sadiq was thrashed to death by a group of people suspected to be connected with a radical Hindu outfit called Hindu Rashtra Sena.
http://www.sacw.net/article8836.html

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17. INDIA: ASSAULT BY RAJASTHAN GOVERNMENT ON THE LEADING GANDHIAN INSTITUTION, THE RAJASTHAN SAMAGRA SEWA SANGH - Statement by Concerned Citizens
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In a shocking and arbitrary exercise of power on the 7th June, 2014, the Jaipur Development Authority, directly under the Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje, sealed the complete premises of the Rajasthan Samagra Sewa Sangh which had been in existence on its own land since 1959. They threw out all the residents and their belongings, cancelled the allotment and took over their land.
http://www.sacw.net/article8877.html

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18. PROMINENT INDIAN SINGER SHUBHA MUDGAL INTIMIDATED AND THREATENED IN CALIFORNIA - STATEMENT BY SAHMAT
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SAHMAT strongly condemns this incident in California where a pro-Modi supporter of Hindutava threatened Shubha Mudgal at a concert, for her vocal and public opposition to the Hindutva forces.
http://www.sacw.net/article8876.html

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19. VIDEO OF ZOHRA SEGAL : CELEBRATING HER 101ST BIRHDAY | Women Speak Channel by Anhad
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Anhad has put together this video on Zohra apa using footage from various Anhad programmes where she participated.
http://www.sacw.net/article8774.html

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20. DRAFT STATEMENT AT THIRD ITUC WORLD CONGRESS 18-23 MAY 2014, BERLIN
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http://www.sacw.net/article8766.html

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21. A NIGHTMARE MATERIALISES IN INDIA: HINDUTVA-CAPITALISM TAKES POWER 
by Praful Bidwai
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The Lok Sabha election has produced what was easily the worst conceivable outcome by giving an outright majority to the Bharatiya Janata Party under a man who is widely believed to have been complicit in mass killings of Indian citizens belonging to one faith, and who even 12 years on has not been fully exonerated by the country's legal system despite its compromised, semi-functional nature, and vulnerability to diabolical manipulation. Make no mistake. Despite a limited (31 percent) national vote, Narendra Modi's victory is the result of a Rightward shift in society, and the triumph of Hindutva combined with neoliberal capitalism.

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22. SANDEEP BHUSHAN - HOW THE TELEVISION NEWS INDUSTRY SCRIPTED THE INDIAN ELECTIONS
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History will judge the just concluded elections as republican India's first intensively televised elections. Never have close to four hundred news networks (they equal the number of entertainment networks, such is the saleability of “news” in our culture) in a bewildering variety of languages and dialects communicated political messages from an equally bewildering array of politicians and political actors across the country. But, equally, never have so many news networks dished out the same fare: Narendra Modi. The Narendra Modi persona, for good or for bad has been largely a television media construction, amplified by saturation-point coverage of the leader, spread out over more than six months—staggering and almost unprecedented, even by global standards.
http://sacw.net/article8855.html

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23. “WORSE THAN REAGAN”: MEET THE VIOLENT CHAUVINIST NOW LEADING INDIA, NARENDRA MODI
by Elias Isquith
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Earlier this month, India, the largest democracy in the world, held its national parliamentary elections. As was widely expected, the result was a clear and potentially epochal victory for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the country's leading right-wing party, and its leader, the pugnacious, nationalistic and neoliberal Narendra Modi, whom the Economist — in a somewhat unprecedented anti-endorsement — recently described as “a man who is still associated with sectarian hatred.”
http://www.sacw.net/article8764.html

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24. INDIA: STATEMENT ON 2014 GENERAL ELECTIONS BY PEOPLE'S ALLIANCE FOR DEMOCRACY AND SECULARISM (P.A.D.S.)
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The Loksabha election results of 2014 surprised everyone. They are beyond the wildest dreams of even the most ardent BJP and Modi supporters, and worse than the worst scenarios imagined by BJP's political opponents. Even though these elections results are singularly stunning, phenomena like these have diverse reasons. A comprehensive understanding and meaningful response require that all these reasons be dispassionately explored and evaluated.
http://www.sacw.net/article8763.html

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25. INDIA: BOKO HARAM AND NIGERIAN CRISIS - A DISCUSSION ON RAJYA SABHA TV
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A discussion on the origins and political implications of Boko Haram movement in Nigeria
http://sacw.net/article8748.html


::: FULL TEXT :::
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26. PAKISTAN: A VIGILANTE STATE & SOCIETY
by Babar Sattar
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(Dawn, 2 June 2014)
DO you judge a society by how it treats its mighty or its vulnerable? What do you call a state that serves the powerful and not the weak? What distinguishes a civilised society from a jungle if survival of the fittest is the rule in both? What is the purpose of having morals, ethics and law if these codes neither protect the frail nor bind the aggressors? If our state unravels it will be due to obvious answers to these rhetorical questions and not due to our fiscal deficit.

Have our ‘so-called’ progressives become self-loathers? Don’t bad things happen in large countries everywhere? Can a small intolerant and violent minority in the society define the sane majority as well? When disciplined passengers at a foreign airport transform into an unruly mob the moment they descend on Pakistan, isn’t the ‘system’ to blame and not the individuals?

Who is to argue that a state or society is doomed forever? Pakistanis are an industrious lot excelling as expats in developed countries. Can’t Pakistan do well too if it adopts a functional ‘system’? Of course it can. But where will such a ‘system’ come from? Are the agents of change within our state or society today wiser from past mistakes and focused on building institutions as opposed to degrading them further?

Something very sinister is happening in Pakistan. As a society we are losing our moral compass; our ability to distinguish right from wrong in daily life (in a non-maulvi sense). And in this polarised state, self-righteousness, bigotry and vigilantism has come to define not just societal reactions but those of state institutions as well. Consequently, state institutions are undermining not just their own credibility but also state legitimacy.

Dr Mehdi Qamar, a US-based cardiologist visiting Pakistan for a week, was shot 10 times and killed in Rabwah last week. Dr Qamar was Ahmadi. If you are an Ahmadi in Pakistan you are fair game. The majority of us have made peace with the fact that because of your faith, the hard-liners amongst us might kill you. Now that we are running out of Ahmadis, we have moved on to Shias. Dr Faisal Manzoor, a fellow Abdalian, was shot dead outside his clinic in Hasanabdal last month. Everyone says he was a great guy. Tough luck that he was Shia.

Last week, during an exchange with an educated, well-travelled and prosperous relative, the conversation turned to Pakistan’s state as it always does. In the context of growing militancy he volunteered that killing Shias might be a tad extreme, but they are mischief-makers with divided loyalties and do ‘deserve’ some of it. This 70-year old, non-violent, generally likeable man, it turned out, was comfortable, if not happy, with the persecution of Shias in Pakistan.

Last week, Farzana Parveen, the three-month pregnant 25-year-old, was hacked in full public view outside Lahore High Court by her father and brothers. She had married of her own will. Farzana’s husband (a middle-aged man who strangled his first wife to death and was released after serving only a one-year prison term because his son forgave him as his mother’s legal heir) claims that his marriage became a matter of ‘honour’ when Farzana’s family didn’t receive the money it demanded.

Some are outraged that the police didn’t respond in time. Is our police force even designed to respond to ordinary citizens? Saqib Jan, a 22-year-old, was killed on May 9 (his throat slit in a neighbouring house) and FIR No. 168 was registered in Thana Wah Cantt. The distraught mother is running from pillar to post to have the police pay heed and arrest the killers. There has been no progress. How do you tell her that she (or Saqib) isn’t significant enough for the state to care?

Having transpired right outside Aiwan-i-Adl, Farzana’s gruesome murder is mocking our criminal justice system. The irony seems lost only on those who sit in the hallowed chambers of justice. The Lahore High Court had ruled back in the ’90s that women who marry someone of their own choice bring their parents into disrepute and don’t deserve the court’s sympathy. The CII insists that parents can marry off little girls and any law prohibiting child-marriage is un-Islamic.

The view that women are chattel is thus shared by the state and society. When the video of the Taliban flogging a woman in Swat was released, guardians of our moral virtue cried conspiracy. Last week, Noor Hussain, a 75-year-old Pakistani immigrant, was sent to jail for 25-years for beating to death his 66-year-old wife in Brooklyn. She cooked him lentils when he wanted meat. Is it a lie that a majority amongst us is OK with men beating their wives, even if beating them to death is a tad extreme?

There will be no reprisal for the killing of Faisal Manzoor, Mehdi Qamar, Farzana Parveen or the 17-year-old from Muzaffargarh who self-immolated after being gang-raped in March this year. This is not because there isn’t enough outrage. There isn’t enough outrage because our culture and we allow for the vulnerable being slapped around (or killed in the process) and minorities being persecuted (or killed).

Tailpiece: The honorable Supreme Court has sought guarantees from the government that no citizens will be starved under its watch. Who will seek guarantees from the Supreme Court that no citizen will be meted injustice under its watch?

The writer is a lawyer.

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27. INDIA: RESISTING MODI THROUGH MASS STRUGGLES
by Praful Bidwai
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(The News, 7 June 2014)

[Resisting Modi through mass struggles] As Narendra Modi chooses his team of advisers and top bureaucrats, some commentators are appealing to him to follow proper appointment procedures, adopt the dharma of inclusion, and “reach out” to the 69 percent of the electorate who didn’t vote for the Bharatiya Janata Party – and especially assure Muslims that they should feel safe under him despite the 2002 Gujarat pogrom.

These commentators are unpardonably naïve in asking Modi to do the opposite of what he stands for. If Modi wanted to send a message of conciliation to Muslims, he would have long ago mourned and expressed sincere regret for the 2002 killings. He hasn’t done so, and defiantly says there’s nothing to apologise for: “If I’m guilty, I should be punished, but I won’t say sorry.”

While canvassing, he wore every type of headgear, including a Sikh turban and an Arunachali hat with horns and petals, but pointedly, and repeatedly, refused to don a skullcap!

The Modi government’s moral apathy towards Muslims was even more eloquently conveyed by the sole Muslim in the cabinet, minority affairs minister Najma Heptullah, through her first public speech declaring that India’s Muslims are too numerous to be a minority; that term best applies to Parsis – India’s wealthiest and most educated community.

This makes nonsense of the idea of protecting the rights of underprivileged religious-minority groups against majoritarianism, the ministry’s liberal-democratic rationale.

Modi has shown no respect for settled democratic conventions in making appointments. Thus, instead of choosing someone with scholarly gravitas, interest in academic pursuits, or a deep understanding of the challenges education faces in India, he allotted the weighty cabinet-rank human resource development portfolio to former actress Smriti Irani who has shown no interest in or aptitude for education, and who filed contradictory affidavits about her educational qualifications, which may be a criminal offence.

Worse, Modi used the ordinance route to override the Telecom Regulatory Authority Act, which bars the TRAI chairman from ever holding government office. This public-interest bar – enacted, ironically, by a BJP-led government in 2000 – is meant to prevent favouritism and promote impartiality, and should have been respected.

Modi was in a rush to appoint former TRAI chairman Nripendra Misra as his principal secretary. He refused to wait for parliament to convene and amend the act. The ordinance violates the Supreme Court judgement in a 1987 case, which says the ordinance power “is to be used to meet an extraordinary situation and cannot be allowed to be perverted to serve political ends”.

Misra’s is clearly a political appointment. He is no ordinary bureaucrat. He was until recently on the executive council of the Vivekananda International Foundation, a well-funded Right-wing think-tank located in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi’s diplomatic enclave.

VIF (www.vifindia.org) is an offshoot of the Vivekananda Kendra, started in 1972 by Eknath Ranade, former RSS general secretary. VIF played a crucial, if silent, role in Baba Ramdev and Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption protests beginning 2011. It runs several security- and foreign policy-related and “historical and civilisational studies” programmes.

VIF’s website carries hysterical pro-Hindutva and ultra-nationalist articles. One article describes US scholar Wendy Doniger as someone who delights in “denigrating Hinduism. Most of her own and her students’ dissertations/books … have often been described as pure pornography…” Doniger’s book on Hinduism was recently pulped – setting a nasty precedent of successful intimidation by the RSS-sponsored Shiksha Bachao Andolan, since carried over.

VIF’s director is former Intelligence Bureau chief Ajit Doval, now appointed the National Security Adviser. As I discovered during a television debate a few years ago, Doval belongs to a school of policing that believes “in shooting first and asking questions later – that’s the only way to deal with terrorists”, real or imagined.

Doval rationalises fake ‘encounter killings’ and advocates a militarist approach towards Maoists – regardless of legality and human rights consequences. He calls for a hard line against India’s neighbours, including friendly Bangladesh, who he believes, are bent on subverting India’s security.

Many VIF leading lights discount the potential for peaceful coexistence between India and Pakistan. India, they demand, should stop being overly “generous” towards its neighbours in economic cooperation, trade, visas, even water-sharing.

VIF, with other pro-Sangh Parivar outfits such as Deendayal Research Institute, Niti Central, Public Policy Research Centre, Friends of the BJP, Centre for Policy Studies and Rashtriya Seva Bharati, will provide policy inputs to Modi.

Under their influence, we are likely to witness a well-orchestrated campaign to shift India’s foreign, security, economic, social and cultural policies rightwards, in keeping with Modi’s own orientation, but with disastrous consequences.

It’s hard to see how the feeble and demoralised parliamentary opposition can resist this onslaught. Many regional outfits like the Samajwadi Party buy into the BJP’s paranoid ultra-nationalist premises and hardline approaches.

Where does that leave the recent elections’ greatest losers – the Congress, the Left, the BSP and the Aam Aadmi Party? The first two have suffered their worst-ever defeats, winning respectively 44 and 12 Lok Sabha seats (including two Left-backed independents from Kerala). The AAP, which showed great promise in December, has come a cropper, winning only four seats, all in Punjab.

These parties face an existential crisis. The Congress still deludes itself that the Gandhi family will somehow rescue it. The family refuses to own up to its leadership failure. Yet, no one demands that the party frees itself from this millstone and start afresh.

Unless the Congress rebuilds its base among the Dalits, Adivasis, lower OBCs and the urban poor, by agitating for their livelihood rights, it’s likely to go into steep, possibly terminal, decline – especially if it loses the coming assembly elections in Maharashtra and Haryana, as seems likely.

The Left’s base has been eroding everywhere, especially in its former bastion West Bengal, where it won the same number of seats (two) as the BJP. Its leadership should have responded to this with alacrity; several heads should have rolled, and the Left should have returned to vigorous mass activity instead of doing “politics from the top” based on unstable, sterile electoral alliances.

Unless the Left urgently corrects course, updates its programmatic perspectives, and develops a mass-based mobilisation strategy by taking up issues like healthcare, food security, employment, education and defence of people’s livelihoods threatened by predatory industrial, mining and water and power projects, it too will be doomed.

The solution lies in radical, painfully critical introspection, abandoning the democratic centralism organisational doctrine which prevents healthy debate, and joining grassroots struggles. This is a tall order, but the Left has no soft options.

As for the AAP, it must reinvent itself not as a political party, but as a political movement which offers new forms of participatory activity not narrowly focused on corruption or “crony capitalism”. The AAP must practise what it preaches – transparency, political honesty and inner-party consultation. It’s the lack of these that aggravated the AAP’s crisis, leading to Shazia Ilmi’s and Yogendra Yadav’s resignations, and to Arvind Kejriwal’s discrediting as an egoistic, unreliable leader.

The AAP must not shy away from ideology. It must link ‘crony capitalism’ to communal-neoliberal authoritarianism. The BJP embodies all these and is the main enemy. Rather than concentrate excessively on the coming Delhi Assembly elections, the AAP must join a broad-based national campaign against neoliberal Hindutva-capitalism. That’s the way forward.

The writer, a former newspaper editor, is a researcher and rights activist based in Delhi.

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28. INDIA: THE 'DISCREET CHARM' OF THE BJP
by Sumanta Banerjee
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(Economic and Political Weekly, June 14, 2014)

With the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Sangh parivar's poster boy in power at the centre, India seems to be heading for a political order in which the social psyche will be marked by the following three traits: (i) thick-skinned insensitivity to problems that are outside one's own domain of immediate, or group interests; (ii) herd mentality of sticking together to defend those interests through a variety of mental shortcuts; and (iii) smooth-skinned hypocrisy to demonstrate one's respectability.

Finally, the Sangh parivar’s poster boy has made it. In the electoral market of a multilayered public demand, and a multi-cornered contest, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) could sell Narendra Modi as the sole winnable candidate by launching an advertising campaign which projected him as a consumer item that appealed to the various layers. He charmed his way from his traditional Hindu conservative base in the cow-belt to the new urban generation of careerist youth, from the aspirant middle classes to the profit-seeking corporate sector, which were all mesmerised by the buzzwords “Gujarat model”, “development”, “governance”. Will Modi’s shelf life last beyond the next five-year period, during which he will have to cope with the demands made by these various competitive layers of the BJP’s vote bank, for their respective pound of flesh? Will his opponents succeed in mounting an effective resistance – both on the floors of the house and in the streets – to dislodge the BJP government in the next Lok Sabha elections?

It is also necessary to remind the Modi-maniacs that their leader has gained the support of only about 32% of the total electorate – and that also concentrated in certain areas of central and western India. The rest of the 68% who did not vote for Modi were divided along different political loyalties, and could not be brought together under a unified opposition canopy that could have swept away the “Modi wave”. But while blaming the first-past-the-post system as an imperfect mechanism for failing to represent and do justice to the actual constellation of opinions at the ground level, let us not underestimate the tenacity of the Sangh parivar’s political outfit, the BJP, and its foot soldiers in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), in making use of this same system to reach its goal. It had unitedly (unlike its political opponents) followed a game plan of steadily making its way into Parliament, with the ultimate objective of capturing power.

Parliamentary Voyage

Let us look at the Sangh parivar’s historical tally in parliamentary elections. Right from the first general elections in 1952, when its then political wing, the Jana Sangh, won three seats, it managed to increase its number to 22 in 1971-72. In the years that followed, the Jana Sangh rode piggyback upon the anti-Congress coalition politics that was initiated by Jayaprakash Narayan, and the anti-Emergency underground campaign during 1975-77. In the 1977 general elections, it joined the anti-Congress alliance of the Janata Party (which swept the polls by winning 298 out of 542 seats) and won 93 seats in the Lok Sabha – a dramatic leap from its earlier performance – making it the largest component in the Janata coalition. But the Jana Sangh’s umbilical cord with its parent RSS became a bone of contention in the Janata Party, with the socialists and ex-Congress members demanding that the Jana Sangh should give up its “double membership”. The internal bickering within the Janata government led to its fall. After the failure of a series of experiments in opportunist alliances to form a government at the centre, the seventh general elections in early January 1980 brought back the Indira Gandhi-led Congress to power. The Janata Party won only 31 seats, out of which the Jana Sangh’s share was 16 – a climb down from its tally of 93 in 1977. Following this defeat, the Sangh parivar elders decided on a new stratagem.

In April 1980, they gave their political outfit a facelift by renaming it as BJP – an amalgam of its old Jana Sangh members and a few deserters from the defeated Janata Party. The new party claimed that it was the authentic representative of the ideas of both, the socialist leader Jayaprakash Narayan and the Jana Sangh ideologue Deendayal Upadhaya – thus trying to bring within its folds a larger following. Its electoral ambitions were however frustrated with the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984, on the sympathy wave of which Rajiv Gandhi rode to power in Delhi that year. The BJP managed to win only two seats in the new Lok Sabha – a throwback to 1952. But thanks to the Congress government’s dismal record (marked by the Bofors’ pay-off scandal), the opposition could again knock together an alliance, win the 1989 elections and form the National Front government. As in the post-Emergency scenario, during the 1989 elections again, the BJP jumped on the anti-Congress bandwagon, and won 86 seats. Since then, there has been no looking back. Even after the 1991 elections which brought back the Congress to power – again on another sympathy wave following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination – the BJP increased its tally to 120 seats.

In 1996, its number went up to 161 in the Lok Sabha, but its efforts to form a government were frustrated by two successive United Fronts which took over the reins with Congress support. The BJP’s next opportunity to capture power in Delhi following a mid-term poll in 1998 – which gave it 182 seats in the Lok Sabha – ran into foul weather, when after 13 months, its Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had to give up after losing majority. But it came back with a vengeance in the elections which took place a year later. It had in the meanwhile struck up alliances with a number of regional parties, which enabled it to gain 296 seats under the umbrella of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), while retaining its own 182 members, and form a government at the centre. It survived for five years, but its record was tarnished by the BJP-run state government sponsored massacre of Muslims in Gujarat in 2002, and by exposures of corruption at the centre which gave the lie to the BJP propaganda of a “Shining India”.

It faced a humiliating defeat in the 2004 elections, when the number of its seats was reduced to 138, and then further to 116 in the 2009 Lok Sabha. Its phenomenal turnaround within five years – in capturing power at the centre as a single party without the need for depending on its partners in a nominal NDA – speaks of a changing configuration of sociopolitical forces in India during the recent past, as well as the BJP’s ability to manipulate them in its favour. This history of the ups and downs in the journey of the BJP deserves serious examination by political ideologues and commentators, economists and sociologists, as well as ground-level activists of political parties and social movements.

BJP’s Odyssey – a la Luis Bunuel

But apart from that sociopolitical analysis, there can also be an alternative cultural perspective that may be useful for understanding BJP’s political odyssey. In the history of political changes, at times, creative writers had interpreted the changes in a more meaningful way than that provided by contemporary combatants on behalf of one political perspective or another. Poets, dramatists, novelists – who were described by Shelley as the “unacknowledged legislators of the world” – had often come up with allegories that had been more prescient than all the political columns in newspapers. I am trying to understand BJP’s electoral quest for power, in terms of a parallel literary discourse that I find in two such allegories – one in the form of a film, and another as a play.

Let me start with the film – which is known as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, made by the eminent and controversial director Luis Bunuel in 1972, satirising the pursuit of power by the Western upper-middle classes. The Sangh parivar’s electoral journey over the last half a century to reach the portals of the Indian Parliament as guests, and today as hosts, resembles the itinerary of the characters in Bunuel’s film – a coterie of ambitious and unscrupulous couples seeking positions of guests or hosts, in the five-star dining ambience of Paris. Their longing for a convivial space to be together, is a metaphor for the nouveau-riche bourgeoisie’s search for sharing power at the top. Bunuel exposes their mendacity (in hiding their crimes), and snobbery and prejudices (against their menials) behind their “discreet charm”, through sequences of dinner parties which somehow or other always get interrupted. One couple hosts a dinner, where the guests arrive, but they themselves are not prepared (remember the BJP’s abortive experiments in 1996-98?). They then go to an eating joint, but find themselves being refused whatever they order (remember the BJP’s humiliating experiences after the 2002 killings in Gujarat, when for some time it was looked down upon as an “untouchable” in Indian politics?). This is followed by a series of similar lunch and dinner parties, which never fructify – just as the BJP’s electoral adventures in the years that followed till 2014. The bourgeoisie in Bunuel’s film is an assortment of respectable looking dubious characters – a gun-toting diplomat from a Latin American banana republic, two French couples who make money by dealing in drug-trafficking with the help of this diplomat, a minister who orders his police to release them after they are caught. They look like anticipatory parodies of the present-day politician-smuggler-criminal cabal of our Indian nouveau-riche classes who, among others have brought Modi to power.

In Bunuel’s film, the main narrative of the search for a dining space (a metaphor for political power) by the French bourgeois couples and their friends, runs parallel to another narrative – their fears and sense of insecurity that are depicted in a number of dream sequences in the film, where these paranoid characters feel scared of being punished for their various nefarious activities. They suffer from nightmares of being killed by unidentified assassins, or arrested by the police. They remind us today of their counterparts among the present BJP leaders and Members of Parliament (MPs), many among whom face criminal and corruption charges, and who should fear punishment. But unlike Bunuel’s film which ends with the characters walking silently along a deserted road towards an uncertain destination, the present Indian political scenario begins with the triumphant arrival of these BJP MPs at their destination along a road crowded with a phalanx of supporters ranging from big business houses of the Tatas, Ambanis and Adanis to intellectuals like Jagdish Bhagwati, Meghnad Desai and Andre Beteille, from the urban jet set to the rural farmers.

However, behind the “discreet charm” that is exuded today by a triumphant BJP and its prime minister, who is making the right noises to impress his domestic constituency and the global community, there looms large the shadow of the nightmarish record of violent communal polarisation that the party and its Sangh parivar parents had introduced in Indian politics – beginning from the pre-Independence period, moving on to the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 under the leadership of the supposedly moderate Lal Krishna Advani which led to one of the worst communal riots after Independence, and then on to the genocide in Gujarat in 2002 under the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi’s patronage. But these riots and the nightmares that continue to haunt their victims are being discreetly glossed over by the new government with a package of populist illusive promises of jobs for the youth, and firm assurances of profit for the corporate sector investors. In an economy marked by the squeezing out of the traditional manufacturing sector by the newfangled high-tech service industries, Modi’s utopia of development may turn out to be a dystopia filled with well-skilled zombies manning those industries, and the laid-off and retrenched workers from the manufacturing sector joining the lumpen-proletariat and filling up the ranks of the Sangh parivar’s foot soldiers to suppress all protest.

Metamorphosing Indian Culture

In a more insidious way, the BJP government may concentrate on its long-term strategy of mutating the pluralistic ethos of our society into a hegemonic order of Hindu nationalism (epitomised by the slogan of “Hindu Rashtra”). As during Murli Manohar Joshi’s stewardship of the human resource development ministry in the previous NDA regime, the present minister may also get institutions like the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) rewrite history textbooks for students with a distinct bias in favour of Hindutva, and pick up academics of the Sangh parivar to head research institutions like the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla and other such centres for higher studies to prevent independent-minded scholars from researching in topics that do not suit Modi’s agenda. At the ground level, now that the BJP is in power, its foot soldiers and moral police will enjoy full liberty to suppress all expressions of dissent in the cultural arena (whether by forcing the banning of books, or vandalising exhibitions of paintings, or disrupting musical and theatrical performances – destructive acts which were allowed even by Congress-ruled governments in Maharashtra and Delhi during the last several decades).

In fact, the assault had begun even before Modi’s swearing in. In BJP-ruled Goa, a 31-year-old engineer, Devu Chodankar, was booked under various sections of the Indian Penal Code, and the Information Technology Act, for his comment on Facebook (during the run-up to the Lok Sabha campaign) that a “holocaust” would follow if Modi became the prime minister (IANS report, 24 May 2014). In Bangalore, on May 25, a 24-year-old MBA student, Syed Waqas, was arrested on the charge of circulating derogatory MMSes against the prime minister-designate Narendra Modi (The Hindu, 26 May 2014). The new central government’s message is clear. Any citizen challenging the prime minister can be hauled up under some provision or other of the various draconian laws that decorate our statute book.

Curiously, however, despite this notorious record of the Sangh parivar’s violent suppression of dissent – whether in the public arena, or in the academic world (e g, the ransacking of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute in Pune in January 2004 after the publication of James Laine’s book Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India), and in the cultural venue (e g, vandalisation of M F Husain’s painting exhibitions) – quite a number of well-known intellectuals, both inside India and abroad, have fallen for the “discreet charm” of the personality of Narendra Modi, who is a dedicated member of the stridently Hindu nationalist RSS. Meghnad Desai, the Labour Party peer from London is all for Modi, hoping that he will provide a “decisive leadership”. The eminent economist Jagdish Bhagwati is publicly craving for the position of Modi’s advisor (The Times of India, 26 April 2014). What is even more disappointing is the statement (made on 25 April 2014) by a liberal-humanist sociologist like Andre Beteille, who expressed the hope that the BJP should come to power. One can understand their frustration with the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government’s failures. But how can one explain their switching over to the BJP – and that also to Narendra Modi of all persons?

Epidemic of ‘Rhinocerosis’ – a la Eugene Ionesco

Let me try to explain this acquiescence by our intellectuals in the BJP’s game plan, through another literary allegory. It is a play called The Rhinoceros, written by Eugene Ionesco in 1959. It explores the mentality of those who succumb to fascist authoritarianism by rationalising their choice. The play begins with a scene where the hero sits with his friend in a café, when suddenly they spot a rhinoceros in the street. At first they dismiss it as a hallucination. But soon, news comes pouring from all parts of the town of the sight of more rhinos. It turns out to be a new epidemic called “rhinocerosis”, where people are willingly turning themselves into rhinos (like the name of the disease rhyming with it – “cirrhosis”, which is brought about by the willingness of addicts to alcohol). At the end, in the rhino-populated town, only two human beings remain – the hero and his lover. In the last scene, even his lover decides to turn herself into a rhino. She defends her decision, by arguing that the rhinoceros has a beautiful smooth skin and erect horns, among other virtues! As she deserts him to join the family of rhinos, the hero is left alone in his room. He picks up a mirror, looks at his face in it, and says: “I want to remain human”.

Needless to say, Ionesco was describing a social psyche that is manipulated by the ruling powers into accepting a single homogeneous political order – where all citizens should look the same. He chose the symbol of rhinoceros to represent three major traits of such a social psyche – (i) thick-skinned insensitivity to problems that are outside their own domain of immediate, or group interests; (ii) herd mentality of sticking together to defend those interests through a variety of mental shortcuts; and (iii) smooth-skinned hypocrisy to demonstrate their respectability. Under this order, individuals are persuaded to think what the others are thinking (which is shaped by the media and other means of pressure), say the same things, and justify why the change is necessary.

Thanks to the verdict given by one-third of our voters under a skewed electoral system, we may be heading for such a political order. While ensuring obfuscation of past misdeeds (like the 2002 Gujarat riots), the BJP is training the middle-class youth into a thick-skinned generation of selfish careerists, gathering the other classes into a herd with the idea of a unitary Indian identity (marked by the symbols of Hindutva and based on a glorious past – again harking back to the Hindu heroes of Indian history), and employing the smooth-skinned economists and bureaucrats to implement the neo-liberal model of development, which Modi had dangled as a carrot to woo the voters. But the rest of the voters, who are in the majority, can still be protected from the epidemic of “rhinocerosis” – if only the liberal, secular and left forces get their act together.

Sumanta Banerjee (suman5ban at yahoo.com) is a long-time contributor to EPW and is best known for his book In the Wake of Naxalbari: A History of the Naxalite Movement in India (1980).

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29. INDIA: BJP'S EMERGING STRUCTURE OF POWER
by Ranabir Samaddar
=========================================
(Daily News and Analysis, 4 June 2014)
		
The BJP’s electoral dominance points to the reappearance of earlier political patterns

The present time has a strange quality to it. It reminds you of the past instead of prodding you to look to the future. Something happens and we look to the past for analogy, lesson, mourning, or celebration. Our time is regressive; we do not have to be reactionary, but it is good to be aware of its specificity.

So with the unprecedented rise to electoral power of the BJP and its leader Narendra Modi, are we reminded of something of the past? In this context, some will of course refer to the post-Indira Gandhi assassination elections handing a massive majority to the Congress, or the general election results of 1977. We witnessed similar results in state elections also in various states. One may also say that the law of the index of opposition unity will now come back. By simple logic, any bloc getting nearly 40 per cent of the votes will reach the mark.

The present situation, however, recalls a more fundamental similarity with the structure of power in the past. To elucidate the similarity briefly: India cannot afford to have an absolutely centralised structure of power, and whatever form of power may emanate from Delhi must have equally emphatic delegated layers to it. Thus, the imperial system must have the designated regimes and zones of local powers with respective functions over the lives and deaths of the commoners.

Except for the last one hundred and fifty years, the Indian state was never the centralised one with which we are familiar today. There were always regional kingdoms, cumulative indigenous changes at local levels reflecting a wide variety of commercialisation, formation of social groups, and political transformations, and different rates of expansion of organised State power. And, whenever powerful and determined kingdoms threatened to overwhelm the entire region and turn into an empire, the stakes became high and led to the formation of alliances to protect regional autonomies. Imperial power in pre-British times depended on many subsidiary alliances, and the decline of empire meant in the first place the instability of those alliances.

Social groups in many places became classes, as happened with the Jats in the sprawling countryside of northern India. The commercialisation and political identity of major local groups went ahead together. Besides the sovereign power, there were other varieties of power. In times of the decline of the sovereign power, the confederal nature of state politics would be clearer – but even in the high times of imperial power and glory, it was evident that beyond some designated matters, power devolved in a variety of ways, and alliances played a big role. Regional viceroys were crucial in maintaining the subahs, which would have to be given relative autonomy sooner or later. Else the imperial army would spend year after year in the area to control rebellions and lawlessness.

Alongside the transformed remains of old royal systems whether in the north or in the south, a range of local powers existed largely outside the imperial and royal systems, which had been built on the rich produce of the valleys and the plains. Only lightly touched by the mainstream of imperial and royal political culture, these were regions and localities based on local economies. In some cases, the local princes acted as protectors of local peasantry against the all-consuming, all-imposing sovereign of Delhi.

Of course, there is a strong line of thinking that the modern State changed all this. The State is now irrevocably centralised. The relative autonomy of the regional kingdoms and the subahs is gone forever.

Yet, the counter question can be: do not the results of the votes this time tell us that the present situation exhibits symptoms of the reappearance of the earlier patterns of power, best described as a combination or a co-existence of the centralised and capillary forms? As then, now too there are palace coteries; now also the State seeks to extend its dominance by restructuring local forms of power and establishing new ones; community divisions are used in the interest of power; and now also the absorption of the ‘fringe’ economies and polities in the ‘mainstream’ causes enormous discontent and rebellion. The suggestions to federalise sovereignty in view of the permanent characteristics of the Indian state system remain valid.
 
Mark out, then, the new fault line in the political structure. On the one hand, we may have a strong Centre bouncing back on the basis of a massive electoral majority, right wing republicanism, Hinduism, ruthless developmentalism, and the active support of the corporate class. On the other hand, entrenched and strong regional leaders appear as protectors of their respective peoples. After all, the entire eastern coastal belt from West Bengal to Tamil Nadu with the additions of Kerala and Telengana has, on the whole, retained faith in their respective rulers. If you add to this the factor that the BJP got nearly a 100 seats from only two states – UP and Bihar – you get a sensible scenario.
 
One may ask then: What is the secret of the staying power of the regional leaders? Of course, the easy answer will be that in each case we find a combination of strong personality, party structure built around the unquestioned leadership of one person, local, that is, state-based identity, and stability of local economy. But besides these, there is one more factor – the populist policies of these state governments. And unlike the administration at the Centre, the state administration is closer to the people and therefore has more capacity to deliver. Against rising prices, shrinking public expenditure on social security, rampant inflation, unbridled corruption, and uncontrolled forces of globalisation, for the people of the states, populism remains the best defence.

There are two points of anxiety in this scenario. First, as of now, none of the political forces has the political wisdom to bind these federal forces into a front and erect a platform of democracy. Second, these regional leaders have attained their unquestioned status by decimating the opponents internal to their states. There is no dialogic trend in the states, which could have made their respective positions stronger on the basis of alliances with other forces within their states.

The author is Director, Calcutta Research Group

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30. JORDAN PIPER'S REVIEW OF ANDREW T. SCULL. MADNESS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION
=========================================
 Andrew T. Scull. Madness: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. xvi + 134 pp. $11.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-19-960803-4.

Reviewed by Jordan Piper (Leeds Trinity and All Saints College)
Published on H-Disability (June, 2014)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison

This book forms part of series by Oxford University Press, described as stimulating ways into new subjects. The book may be concise, but it contains a wealth of detailed information written in an engaging manner. No previous knowledge of the subject is required and the reader is quickly drawn into the book. 

Scull begins the first chapter by stating that madness is something that has always frightened and fascinated society. He asserts that the use of the word “madness” is now unacceptable. It is therefore interesting that he chooses this word as the title of the book, perhaps to attract interest and create an immediate reaction. The fear of mental illness continues to the modern day and Scull writes that this has always been so. The treatment and management of those with mental illness have changed throughout the ages, but society's fear has not. There are impactful and thought-provoking statements throughout the book. Scull is constantly challenging the reader to consider the subject. 

Scull concentrates on madness in the Western world, from the ancient Greeks to the present day. He remarks that there is no single diagnosis to separate the sane from the mad, a fact which goes some way to explain society’s fascination with it. Indeed, it could happen to us all and thus people are afraid of it. Early depictions of madness are found in Shakespeare and continued as a theme in literature. William Hogarth’s (1697-1764) paintings included depictions within Bedlam. Scull sets the scene with some early descriptions of the lives of the insane, for whom care was provided primarily by the church or the family. 

The mass confinement of the insane within asylums is described with much derision, including the public visiting Bedlam where the inmates could be viewed as though in a zoo, the Victorian attempts to cure madness through experimentation, and the mentally ill murdered during the Nazi holocaust. Scull is critical of the asylum era. He describes it as “utopianism” in the United States where there was a “cult of curability” in the 1820s and 1830s (p. 46). The mania for asylum-building occurred all over western Europe and North America. The optimism was present throughout Europe and it is apparent that many thought this would end the social problem of madness. This period culminated in the eugenic movement, “the ‘science’ of good breeding” (p. 62). Legislation was introduced in many American states which forbade the mentally ill to marry, and later enforced sterilization. Such science was built upon by Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), who orchestrated the mass extermination of the mentally ill--those with “useless lives” (p. 64). 

The treatment of mental illness progressed during the nineteenth century. Scull states that the German doctor Wilhelm Griesinger (1817-68) linked research and teaching when he became the director of a Zurich asylum in 1860. It was believed that there was a link between brain disease and mental illness, but research into this led nowhere. The treatment of patients with hysteria as a biological condition changed with the work of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), who tried to find meaning in madness. The twentieth century saw the development of the lobotomy and electric shock therapy. Egas Moniz (1874-1955) won the Noble Prize for medicine in 1949 for use of the lobotomy. Again, there was much optimism that a solution had been found, but by the 1960s this operation was seen as brutal and barbaric and was almost completely withdrawn from use. 

The final chapter describes the change in treatment from incarceration in the asylum to control through medication and the development of psychoanalysis. The experiments on patients who had no civil rights is a reminder of the eugenics movement. Scull concludes the chapter by identifying the current situation where psychiatrists prescribe Prozac rather than counseling, while there are those who would have benefited from the limited support and care of the Victorian institution but have been cast out. The legacy of this will obviously continue to evolve. 

The illustrations are well chosen and impactful. Scull has chosen to include, among others, a photograph of the staff at Hadamar Nazi death camp smiling at the camera; a picture of John Norris, a man incarcerated at Bedlam so that he could not move more than a foot; a doctor about to perform a transorbital lobotomy (using a mallet and small ice-pick device) at the Western State hospital, Washington, in 1949; and a twentieth-century advert for Thorazine, one of the first antipsychotic drugs. Scull also includes paintings from John Everett Millais (1829-96) and Edgar Degas (1834-1917). Reference is made to the appearance of mad women in Victorian literature, for example Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847) and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1859). The depiction of madness in art and literature through the ages is a useful accompaniment to the history told by Scull whereas the photographs and illustrations provide a frighteningly real insight into the past. 

The book is incredibly well researched and is an excellent gateway to the subject. The sources used are vast. The only criticism is that Scull’s obvious derision and often sensationalist rhetoric can distract from the facts. He does not make any allowance for the benefit of hindsight and the book is a scathing description of the ways the mentally ill have been treated. Academic interest in the history of disability is growing at a steady pace and it is likely that one day it will be equal to the history of gender and race. Reading this book would be a huge benefit to students of disability history and medicine or those who have any interest in the subject. The book gives the reader much to consider and may even change their perception of those with mental illness.

Citation: Jordan Piper. Review of Scull, Andrew T., _Madness: A Very
Short Introduction_. H-Disability, H-Net Reviews. June, 2014.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

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31. PAKISTAN: WORSE THAN WE KNEW
by Ahmed Rashid
=========================================
(The New York Review of Books, June 5, 2014 Issue)
The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014
by Carlotta Gall
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 329 pp., $28.00

A pro-Taliban rally in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province, circa 2002

During the Afghan elections in early April I was traveling in Central Asia, mainly in Kyrgyzstan. I wanted to inquire into the fears of the governments there as a result of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. What did they think of the growth of Taliban and Islamic extremism in Afghanistan and Pakistan? Officials in each country cited two threats. First, the internal radicalizing of their young people by increasing numbers of preachers or proselytizing groups arriving from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Middle East. The second, more dangerous threat is external: they believe that extremist groups based in Pakistan and Afghanistan are trying to infiltrate Central Asia in order to launch terrorist attacks.

Islamic extremism is infecting the entire region and this will ultimately become the legacy of the US occupation of Afghanistan, as the so-called jihad by the Taliban against the US comes to an end. Iran, a Shia state, fears that the Sunni extremist groups that have installed themselves in Pakistan’s Balochistan province on the Iranian border will step up their attacks inside Iran. In February Iran threatened to send troops into Balochistan unless Pakistan helped free five Iranian border guards who had been kidnapped by militants. (The Pakistanis freed four of the guards; one was killed.)

Chinese officials say they are particularly concerned about terrorist groups coming out of Pakistan and Afghanistan that are undermining Chinese security. Although China is Pakistan’s closest ally, its officials have made it clear that they are closely monitoring the Uighur Muslims from Xinjiang province, who are training in Pakistan, fighting in Afghanistan, and have carried out several terrorist attacks in Xinjiang.

Terrorist assaults from Pakistan into Indian Kashmir have declined sharply since 2003, but India has a perennial fear that Islamic militant groups based in Pakistan’s Punjab province may mount attacks in India. Many Punjabi fighters have joined the Taliban forces based in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, and they have attacked Indian targets in Afghanistan. India is also wary of another terrorist attack resembling the one that took place in Mumbai in 2008.

For forty years Pakistan has been backing Islamic extremist groups as part of its expansionist foreign policy in Afghanistan and Central Asia and its efforts to maintain equilibrium with India, its much larger enemy. Now Pakistan is undergoing the worst terrorist backlash in the entire region. Some 50,000 people have died in three separate and continuing insurgencies: one by the Taliban in the northwest, the other in Balochistan by Baloch separatists, and the third in Karachi by several ethnic groups. That sectarian war, involving suicide bombers, massacres, and kidnappings, has gripped the country for a decade.

Some five thousand Pakistani soldiers and policemen have been killed and some twenty thousand wounded, both as targets of terrorist attacks and during offensives against them. The economy has sharply declined, and there are widespread electricity shortages. The political elite is divided and at odds with the military over how to deal with terrorism, while many in the middle class are leaving the country.

Two years ago all the states in the region would have publicly or privately accused Pakistan’s military and Interservices Intelligence (ISI) of supporting, protecting, or at least tolerating almost every terrorist group based in Pakistan. The ISI had links with all of them and often collaborated with them. Recently those relations have changed. Governments in the region now accept that Pakistan is in some ways trying to fight terrorism on its soil. But those governments are also concerned that the Pakistani military and political elite have lost control of large parts of the country and cannot maintain law and order. The US and Western countries fear that Pakistan’s nuclear weapons arsenal is vulnerable and that terrorists in Pakistan may be planning an attack comparable to that of September 11.

There is still no overall political or military strategy to combat Islamic extremism. The Pakistani army tries to suppress some terrorist groups but not, for example, those that target India. Such a selective strategy cannot be maintained indefinitely and poses enormous risks to the entire world.

Since the mid-1970s the ISI has supported extremist Islamic groups in Afghanistan including the Taliban, but that policy may now be changing. Contrary to many predictions, the situation in Afghanistan may be taking a turn for the better. Despite the threat of Taliban reprisals, seven million Afghans turned out on April 5 to vote in the first presidential election in which President Hamid Karzai was not a candidate. This was also the first genuine attempt in Afghan history to transfer power democratically. A remarkable 58 percent of the 12 million eligible voters turned out—35 percent of them women. Although the Taliban did not make a show of force to stop the vote, relatively few people voted in many Taliban-controlled areas in the south and east. Preliminary results released on April 26 show the Tajik leader Abdullah Abdullah in the lead with 45 percent of the vote and his Pashtun rival Ashraf Ghani trailing with 32 percent. Over three thousand cases of fraud still have to be investigated before the count is final.

Since neither candidate had a majority of 50 percent, there will be a runoff election between the two by the end of May. A new government will not be in place before July, which means that a security agreement with the US, which all the candidates have agreed to, will be delayed. The US and NATO want a military force of some ten thousand to stay in the country in order to train the Afghan army and gather intelligence. Such an agreement will be necessary if the US Congress and Europe are to be persuaded to keep the Kabul government financially afloat. Afghanistan needs a minimum of $7 billion a year to pay for its budget and army. In January the US Congress cut by half the $2 billion earmarked for US aid to Afghanistan.

To bring the civil war to an end the new president will try to open talks with the Pashtun Taliban in Afghanistan. Pakistan is now also keen on such talks because two thirds of Pashtuns live in Pakistan, including members of the Taliban, and there has been talk by Islamists of carving out a separate Pashtun state. Will the Pakistan military put pressure on the Afghan Taliban leaders who live in Pakistan to talk to the new government in Kabul while Pakistan deals with its own Pashtun problem? A lot will depend on whether a much weakened Pakistan still has the power to force the Afghan Taliban to engage in negotiations.

All the recent books I have seen on the Afghan wars have recounted how the Pakistani military backed the Taliban when they first emerged in 1993, but lost its influence by 2000. Then, after a brief respite following September 11, 2001, Pakistan’s military helped to resurrect the Taliban resistance to fight the Americans. My own three books on Afghanistan describe the actions of the Pakistani military as one factor in keeping the civil war going and contributing to the American failure to win decisively in Afghanistan.*

Now in The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan, 2001–2014, Carlotta Gall, the New York Times reporter in Afghanistan and Pakistan for more than a decade, has gone one step further. She places the entire onus of the West’s failure in Afghanistan and the Taliban’s successes on the Pakistani military and the Taliban groups associated with it. Her book has aroused considerable controversy, not least in Pakistan. Its thesis is quite simple:

    The [Afghan] war has been a tragedy costing untold thousands of lives and lasting far too long. The Afghans were never advocates of terrorism yet they bore the brunt of the punishment for 9/11. Pakistan, supposedly an ally, has proved to be perfidious, driving the violence in Afghanistan for its own cynical, hegemonic reasons. Pakistan’s generals and mullahs have done great harm to their own people as well as their Afghan neighbors and NATO allies. Pakistan, not Afghanistan, has been the true enemy. 

Dogged, curious, insistent on uncovering hidden facts, Gall’s reporting over the years has been a nightmare for the American, Pakistani, and other foreign powers involved in Afghanistan, while it has been welcomed by many Afghans. She quickly emerged as the leading Western reporter living in Kabul. She made her reputation by reporting on the terrible loss of innocent Afghan lives as American aircraft continued to bomb the Pashtun areas in southern Afghanistan even after the war of 2001 had ended. The bombing of civilians was said to be accidental, supposedly based on faulty intelligence; but it continued for years and helped the Taliban turn the population against the Americans.

Before human rights groups or police arrived in remote, bombed villages, Gall was often there first. Thus in July 2002, she writes of driving “for three days over dusty and rutted roads” to reach a village in Uruzgan province that had been bombed during a wedding. Fifty-four wedding guests were killed, including thirteen children from one household, and over one hundred people were wounded. The survivors of this massacre “were collecting body parts in a bucket”—Gall’s quote of the provincial governor that haunted reporters and other observers in Kabul. She continued:

    Sahib Jan, a twenty-five-year-old neighbor, was one of the first to reach the groom’s house after the bombardment. Bodies were lying all over the two courtyards and in the adjoining orchard, some of them in pieces. Human flesh hung in the trees. A woman’s torso was lodged in an almond sapling…. Bodies lay in the dust and rubble of the rooms below. 

Some of those killed were friends of President Karzai and these bombings infuriated him and caused his relations with the US to deteriorate. As late as 2009 Gall was still covering such disasters, as when US planes bombed the village of Granai, killing 147 people—“the worst single incident of civilian casualties of the war.”

Carlotta Gall was, in effect, a one-woman human rights agency. She spent much time and effort exposing the torture and killing of Afghans taken prisoner by the Americans. This was a highly sensitive issue—the American victors did not expect American media to expose their wrongdoings. But Gall went ahead. She told the heartbreaking story of Dilawar, a naive taxi driver who was wrongly arrested in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, incarcerated in an isolation ward at the US airbase at Bagram, and then beaten to death by his American jailors. She spent many weeks tracking down Dilawar’s family and obtained the death certificate issued by the US Army:

    I gasped as I read it. I had been looking to learn more about the Afghans being detained. I had not expected to find a homicide committed by American soldiers. 

Nobody was ever charged and the same US team of interrogators was deployed to Abu Ghraib in Iraq—the other site of grisly US treatment of prisoners. Gall’s modesty does not allow her to mention that it was this story that led to the making of the 2007 Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.

Prayer flags at a Taliban graveyard on the outskirts of Kandahar city, Afghanistan, February 2005; photograph by Robert Nickelsberg from his book Afghanistan: A Distant War, just published by Prestel

All her skills were put to the test when she reported on the death of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad and tried to discover whether senior Pakistanis had been hiding him all along. Methodically adding one fact to another, she concludes not only that some were, which is convincing, but that all the top officials in the military and the ISI knew of his whereabouts, although the evidence she offers for such widespread knowledge is not wholly plausible; and her assertion that there was a specific “bin Laden desk” at the ISI appears, from my own inquiries, to be flimsy.

For many Pakistanis the main failure of the government is that nobody has ever been punished or held responsible either for hiding bin Laden or not discovering him earlier. Gall surmises that the ISI had let it be known that bin Laden’s hideaway was an ISI safe house. That is why nobody ever knocked on the door—a reasonable assumption.

However, the fiercest opposition to her views comes from American officials themselves. They insist, as they are obliged to do, that none of the top Pakistani leaders knew of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Gall’s conclusion that the Obama administration deliberately kept the ISI’s role in harboring bin Laden secret in order to save the US–Pakistan relationship is difficult to accept for two reasons. The first is simply the propensity of officials in Washington to leak to journalists. The second is that US–Pakistani relations would collapse a few months after the killing of bin Laden over different issues, notably Pakistan’s support of the Taliban. The US therefore would not have been so concerned to protect its relations with Pakistan.

Most states today, including the US and NATO countries, believe that the Pakistani military is no longer in control of the Taliban in Afghanistan or capable of putting decisive pressure on them. The army leaders have too much of a problem at home with their own Pakistani Taliban. Their ability to persuade the Afghan Taliban to make peace with Kabul is very limited. Moreover, the Pakistani military has shown no willingness to kick the Afghan Taliban out of Pakistan and back to Afghanistan. The civilian government is trying to negotiate with the Pakistani Taliban but the military is against such talks and would rather use force, a major division in policymaking in Islamabad. There are enormous risks involved, such as the two Talibans merging to fight the Pakistani army.

The Pakistani military belatedly understands that a Taliban conquest in Afghanistan would eventually ensure that Pakistan would find itself with a Taliban government in Islamabad. As Gall recounts, the Pakistani army has spent years propping up the Afghan Taliban, training their fighters, allowing them to import arms and money from the Arabian Gulf and to recruit among Pakistani youth. As Gall shows, the army even decided which tactics the Afghan Taliban should use. The army is now desperate to find a political solution that would send the Afghan Taliban home.

Many army and police officers find themselves confused as they are ordered to protect some Taliban and other extremists and kill others. Pakistani officials are supposed to be loyal allies of the US and they take its money but they also are encouraged by powerful Pakistanis to promote anti-Americanism in society and the army. There has been no adequate explanation for these dual-track policies, which have ravaged state and society and undermined the army internally. Moreover the army is still not prepared to give up its militant stand against India.

Gall writes that Pakistani soldiers “were fighting, and dying, in campaigns against Islamist militants, apparently at the request of America, but at the same time they were being fed a constant flow of anti-American and pro-Taliban propaganda.” Unfortunately she does not acknowledge that there have been shifts in the military’s thinking and that it faces the more open kind of confusion over its strategy and its loyalties that I have described. Her book starts and ends on the same note even though thirteen years have elapsed.

Afghans have observed that the ISI has not interfered in the Afghan elections. Contrary to its policy since the 1970s, it has avoided favoring Pashtun candidates. It has also tried to improve relations with the former anti- Taliban Northern Alliance (NA) warlords it once opposed by meeting with the leaders of Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek groups that were the major components of the alliance. Consequently all the Afghan presidential candidates have softened their comments on Pakistan, avoiding the harsh rhetoric of Hamid Karzai.

Yet for the reasons described by Gall, the Pakistani military still does not comprehend how deeply Pakistan is hated by most Afghans. Even today the worst atrocities and suicide bombings causing civilian deaths are often blamed on the Taliban elements “trained by Pakistanis.” Hatred for Pakistan is possibly even stronger among the Afghan Pashtuns who have been Pakistan’s traditional allies. The Pakistani army must undergo deep self-examination and show considerable humility in dealing with the Afghans if it is to genuinely create an opportunity for peace.

However there are large gaps in Gall’s analysis that cannot be ignored. Pakistan was not the only cause of the failure to control the Afghan Taliban; the failure in Afghanistan has been an American failure as well. The lack of a US political strategy stretched over four administrations. Two Presidents—Bush and Obama—were unable to make up their minds about what to do in Afghanistan or how many troops should carry out which tasks. The overwhelming militarization of US decision-making and the hubris of American generals undermined diplomacy and nation-building; the US failed to curb open production of opium and other drugs. There was constant infighting between the White House, Defense, and State Departments over policy. There was also widespread corruption and waste both in the private contracting system used by the US military and in some of the operations of the US Agency for International Development. The list of such American failures is indeed long, and assigning responsibility for the losses in Afghanistan will occupy US historians for decades.

Gall’s second omission is not to recognize the negative effects caused by the neighboring countries, apart from Pakistan, and their constant interference in Afghanistan. She ignores the Afghan civil war after 1989 when all the Afghan warlords had international backers. She fails to mention that Pakistan and Saudi Arabia backed the Taliban while Russia, Iran, India, Turkey, and the Central Asian republics supported the Northern Alliance.

More recently Iran has given sanctuary to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, India is funding the Baloch separatist insurgency in Pakistan, and Afghanistan has provided a refuge to the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The US presence has failed to provide protection for people in the region. Most Afghans will tell you today that what they fear most about the Americans leaving is that intervention from all the country’s neighbors will start again. Gall doesn’t blame neighbors other than Pakistan.

Why did Pakistan adopt policies of intervention in Afghanistan, especially after September 11, when it had essentially lost the game in Afghanistan? There has been a disastrous logic to the military’s policies—which more thoughtful Pakistanis have always resisted.

Here some history is useful. The Pakistan military has used militant political groups as an arm of its foreign policy in India and Afghanistan since the 1970s. This was allowed by the West as part of the cold war. During the 1980s the CIA funded the Afghan Mujahideen and Islamic extremists from forty countries when they were fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. It was not until September 11 that Pakistan’s use of Islamic extremists as a tool of its foreign policy became unacceptable.

After September 11 General Pervez Musharraf and the military regime believed that they could, for a time, appear to meet US demands by capturing al-Qaeda leaders while avoiding harm to the Afghan Taliban. Musharraf was always treated as a messiah by the Bush administration; but a year after September 11 well-informed Pakistanis knew that Musharraf had started playing a double game with the Americans by covertly supporting a Taliban resurgence.

What was the Pakistan military’s logic in doing so? After the war to oust the Taliban was over in 2001 the military faced the defeat of its Taliban allies and had to suffer the Northern Alliance and its backers—including India and Iran—as victors in Kabul. Musharraf felt he had to preserve some self-respect; and Bush appeared to acknowledge this when he allowed ISI agents to be airlifted out of Kunduz before the city fell to the Northern Alliance and its backers—a series of events well described by Gall. Bush had also promised Musharraf that the NA would not enter Kabul before a neutral Afghan body under the UN took over the city. But as the Taliban fled, the NA walked into Kabul without a fight and took over the government.

The Pakistani military was further angered at Bonn in December 2001, when the new Afghan government was unveiled and all the provincial security ministries were handed over to the Northern Alliance, with Pashtun representation at a minimum. This was the usual outcome by which the spoils of war went to the victors, but for Pakistan’s generals it was further humiliation that bred resentment and a desire for revenge.

The military was equally perplexed about why the US did not commit more ground troops to hunt down al-Qaeda instead of leaving that task to Northern Alliance warlords. The military was convinced that the Americans would soon abandon Afghanistan for the war in Iraq and leave the NA, backed by India, in charge in Kabul.

Bush’s refusal to commit even one thousand US troops to the mountains of Tora Bora where bin Laden was trapped sent a powerful message to Pakistan. By 2003 US forces in Afghanistan still amounted to only 11,500 men—insufficient to hold the country. Five years later in 2008 there were only 35,000 US troops in Afghanistan, compared to five times that number in Iraq.

The Pakistani military’s insecurity about American intentions and the growing power of the NA, India, and Iran led to its fateful decision to rearm the Taliban. It believed that the Taliban would provide a form of protection for the Pakistani military against its enemies. Instead the revamped Afghan Taliban helped create the Pakistani Taliban and the worst blowback of terrorism in Pakistan’s history. It is the Taliban’s terrorism within Pakistan rather than US pressure that altered the military’s position from backing the Afghan Taliban to its now seeking a peaceful Afghanistan.

Gall’s account of the rise of the Taliban is also open to question. She writes that three commanders in Kandahar and Kabul—two of them drug smugglers and one of them a landlord—initiated the Taliban movement. Between 1994 and 1998, in Kandahar and Kabul, I interviewed nearly all the students who were the founding members of the Taliban and the three men she names were never mentioned, except as intermittent financiers. The founders of the Taliban were pious, conservative, simple young villagers who had fought the Soviets as foot soldiers and were now deeply disillusioned with their former leaders for fighting a civil war. They came together to rid Kandahar of criminal gangs. They then traveled around the country asking warlords to help end the civil war and bring peace. When that failed they decided to launch their own movement.

Contrary to Gall’s account that they wanted power over Afghanistan from the first, the Taliban founders initially had only three aims—to end the civil war, disarm the population, and introduce an Islamic system. Until they reached the gates of Kabul in late 1995, they had no intentions of ruling the country. Instead they were demanding a Loya Jirga, or meeting of tribal elders, to decide who should rule. Some, like Mullah Borjan, were actually royalists who wanted to call back the former King Zahir Shah from exile. Gall says Borjan was killed at the behest of the ISI in 1996, although it is widely accepted that he died a year earlier in the first attack on Kabul.

All the founding members of the Taliban I interviewed gave a different account from Gall’s of the rise of their leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They all had equal status, the requisite piety, and a strong record of fighting the Soviets. There was no natural commander among them. After much debate they picked Omar as the first among equals, the most pious and apparently the most humble. His status rose only after he insisted that his colleagues swear an oath of allegiance to him. He continues to be powerful. Too much of Gall’s information and analysis on the history of the Taliban seems to reflect the views of the Afghan intelligence service, whose own interpretation is flawed and one-sided.

Today, with Pakistan torn apart by unprecedented violence and the situation in Afghanistan still precarious, the Pakistani military has strong reasons to change its past policies of sponsoring wars fought by nonstate organizations. Some changes are happening, but only at a glacial pace. Serious reform needs to start at the lowest level of the military, at the schools and colleges from which the army is drawn, where drastic curriculum changes are needed. The ISI needs to be brought under a code of conduct and accountability, particularly with respect to its dealings with violent organizations. Its personnel should be trained in political realism rather than in ideological prejudices. Unless changes in the army can be made more quickly, there is still the danger that this nuclear power could slip into chaos.

    * The trilogy is: Taliban (I.B. Tauris, 2000); Descent into Chaos: The US and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (Viking, 2008); Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan, and Afghanistan (Viking, 2012). 

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32. TIGHTENING THE U.S. GRIP ON WESTERN EUROPE: WASHINGTON’S IRON CURTAIN IN UKRAINE
 by Diana Johnstone
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(Counterpunch, Weekend Edition June 6-8, 2014)
NATO leaders are currently acting out a deliberate charade in Europe, designed to reconstruct an Iron Curtain between Russia and the West.

With astonishing unanimity, NATO leaders feign surprise at events they planned months in advance. Events that they deliberately triggered are being misrepresented as sudden, astonishing, unjustified “Russian aggression”. The United States and the European Union undertook an aggressive provocation in Ukraine that they knew would force Russia to react defensively, one way or another.

They could not be sure exactly how Russian president Vladimir Putin would react when he saw that the United States was manipulating political conflict in Ukraine to install a pro-Western government intent on joining NATO.  This was not a mere matter of a “sphere of influence” in Russia’s “near abroad”, but a matter of life and death to the Russian Navy, as well as a grave national security threat on Russia’s border.

A trap was thereby set for Putin. He was damned if he did, and damned if he didn’t.  He could underreact, and betray Russia’s basic national interests, allowing NATO to advance its hostile forces to an ideal attack position.

Or he could overreact, by sending Russian forces to invade Ukraine.  The West was ready for this, prepared to scream that Putin was “the new Hitler”, poised to overrun poor, helpless Europe, which could only be saved (again) by the generous Americans.

In reality, the Russian defensive move was a very reasonable middle course.  Thanks to the fact that the overwhelming majority of Crimeans felt Russian, having been Russian citizens until Khrushchev frivolously bestowed the territory on Ukraine in 1954, a peaceful democratic solution was found.  Crimeans voted for their return to Russia in a referendum which was perfectly legal according to international law, although in violation of the Ukrainian constitution, which was by then in tatters having just been violated by the overthrow of the country’s duly elected president, Victor Yanukovych, facilitated by violent militias.  The change of status of Crimea was achieved without bloodshed, by the ballot box.

Nevertheless, the cries of indignation from the West were every bit as hysterically hostile as if Putin had overreacted and subjected Ukraine to a U.S.-style bombing campaign, or invaded the country outright – which they may have expected him to do.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry led the chorus of self-righteous indignation, accusing Russia of the sort of thing his own government is in the habit of doing. “You just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests. This is an act of aggression that is completely trumped up in terms of its pretext”, Kerry pontificated.  “It’s really 19th century behavior in the 21st century”. Instead of laughing at this hypocrisy, U.S. media, politicians and punditry zealously took up the theme of Putin’s unacceptable expansionist aggression. The Europeans followed with a weak, obedient echo.

It Was All Planned at Yalta

 In September 2013, one of Ukraine’s richest oligarchs, Viktor Pinchuk, paid for an elite strategic conference on Ukraine’s future that was held in the same Palace in Yalta, Crimea, where Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met to decide the future of Europe in 1945.  The Economist, one of the elite media reporting on what it called a “display of fierce diplomacy”, stated that: “The future of Ukraine, a country of 48m people, and of Europe was being decided in real time.” The participants included Bill and Hillary Clinton, former CIA head General David Petraeus, former U.S. Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers, former World Bank head Robert Zoellick, Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, Shimon Peres, Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mario Monti, Lithuanian president Dalia Grybauskaite, and Poland’s influential foreign minister Radek Sikorski.  Both President Viktor Yanukovych, deposed five months later, and his recently elected successor Petro Poroshenko were present. Former U.S. energy secretary Bill Richardson was there to talk about the shale-gas revolution which the United States hopes to use to weaken Russia by substituting fracking for Russia’s natural gas reserves.  The center of discussion was the “Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement” (DCFTA) between Ukraine and the European Union, and the prospect of Ukraine’s integration with the West.  The general tone was euphoria over the prospect of breaking Ukraine’s ties with Russia in favor of the West.

Conspiracy against Russia?  Not at all. Unlike Bilderberg, the proceedings were not secret. Facing a dozen or so American VIPs and a large sampling of the European political elite was a Putin adviser named Sergei Glazyev, who made Russia’s position perfectly clear.

Glazyev injected a note of political and economic realism into the conference.   Forbes reported at the time  on the “stark difference” between the Russian and Western views “not over the advisability of Ukraine’s integration with the EU but over its likely impact.”  In contrast to Western euphoria, the Russian view was based on “very specific and pointed economic criticisms” about the Trade Agreement’s impact on Ukraine’s economy, noting that Ukraine was running an enormous foreign accounts deficit, funded with foreign borrowing, and that the resulting substantial increase in Western imports ccould only swell the deficit.  Ukraine “will either default on its debts or require a sizable bailout”.

The Forbes reporter concluded that “the Russian position is far closer to the truth than the happy talk coming from Brussels and Kiev.”

As for the political impact, Glazyev pointed out that the Russian-speaking minority in Eastern Ukraine might move to split the country in protest against cutting ties with Russia, and that Russia would be legally entitled to support them, according to The Times of London.

In short, while planning to incorporate Ukraine into the Western sphere, Western leaders were perfectly aware that this move would entail serious problems with Russian-speaking Ukrainians, and with Russia itself.  Rather than seeking to work out a compromise, Western leaders decided to forge ahead and to blame Russia for whatever would go wrong.  What went wrong first was that Yanukovych  got cold feet faced with the economic collapse implied by the Trade Agreement with the European Union.  He postponed signing, hoping for a better deal. Since none of this was explained clearly to the Ukrainian public, outraged protests ensued, which were rapidly exploited by the United States… against Russia.

Ukraine as Bridge…Or Achilles Heel

Ukraine, a term meaning borderland, is a country without clearly fixed historical borders that has been stretched too far to the East and too far to the West.  The Soviet Union was responsible for this, but the Soviet Union no longer exists, and the result is a country without a unified identity and which emerges as a problem for itself and for its neighbors.

It was extended too far East, incorporating territory that might as well have been Russian, as part of a general policy to distinguish the USSR from the Tsarist empire, enlarging Ukraine at the expense of its Russian component and demonstrating that the Soviet Union was really a union among equal socialist republics.  So long as the whole Soviet Union was run by the Communist leadership, these borders didn’t matter too much.

It was extended too far West at the end of World War II. The victorious Soviet Union extended Ukraine’s border to include Western regions, dominated by the city variously named Lviv, Lwow,  Lemberg or Lvov, depending on whether it belonged to Lithuania, Poland, the Habsburg Empire or the USSR, a region which was a hotbed of anti-Russian sentiments. This was no doubt conceived as a defensive move, to neutralize hostile elements, but it created the fundamentally divided nation that today constitutes the perfect troubled waters for hostile fishing.

The Forbes report cited above pointed out that: “For most of the past five years, Ukraine was basically playing a double game, telling the EU that it was interested in signing the DCFTA while telling the Russians that it was interested in joining the customs union.”  Either Yanukovych could not make up his mind, or was trying to squeeze the best deal out of both sides, or was seeking the highest bidder.  In any case, he was never “Moscow’s man”, and his downfall owes a lot no doubt to his own role in playing both ends against the middle. His was a dangerous game of pitting greater powers against each other.

It is safe to say that what was needed was something that so far seems totally lacking in Ukraine: a leadership that recognizes the divided nature of the country and works diplomatically to find a solution that satisfies both the local populations and their historic ties with the Catholic West and with Russia.  In short, Ukraine could be a bridge between East and West – and this, incidentally, has been precisely the Russian position.  The Russian position has not been to split Ukraine, much less to conquer it, but to facilitate the country’s role as bridge.  This would involve a degree of federalism, of local government, which so far is entirely lacking in the country, with local governors selected not by election but by the central government in Kiev.  A federal Ukraine could both develop relations with the EU and maintain its vital (and profitable) economic relations with Russia.

But this arrangement calls for Western readiness to cooperate with Russia. The United States has plainly vetoed this possibility, preferring to exploit the crisis to brand Russia “the enemy”.

Plan A and Plan B

U.S. policy, already evident at the September 2013 Yalta meeting, was carried out on the ground by Victoria Nuland, former advisor to Dick Cheney, deputy ambassador to NATO, spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton, wife of neocon theorist Robert Kagan. Her leading role in the Ukraine events proves that the neo-con influence in the State Department, established under Bush II, was retained by Obama, whose only visible contribution to foreign policy change has been the presence of a man of African descent in the presidency, calculated to impress the world with U.S. multicultural virtue.  Like most other recent presidents, Obama is there as a temporary salesman for policies made and executed by others.

As Victoria Nuland boasted in Washington, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States has spent five billion dollars to gain political influence in Ukraine (this is called “promoting democracy”).  This investment is not “for oil”, or for any immediate economic advantage. The primary motives are geopolitical, because Ukraine is Russia’s Achilles’ heel, the territory with the greatest potential for causing trouble to Russia.

What called public attention to Victoria Nuland’s role in the Ukrainian crisis was her use of a naughty word, when she told the U.S. ambassador, “Fuck the EU”.  But the fuss over her bad language veiled her bad intentions.  The issue was who should take power away from the elected president Viktor Yanukovych.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party been promoting former boxer Vitaly Klitschko as its candidate.  Nuland’s rude rebuff signified that the United States, not Germany or the EU, was to choose the next leader, and that was not Klitschko but “Yats”.  And indeed it was Yats, Arseniy Yatsenyuk , a second-string US-sponsored technocrat known for his enthusiasm for IMF austerity policies and NATO membership, who got the job. This put a U.S. sponsored government, enforced in the streets by fascist militia with little electoral clout but plenty of armed meanness, in a position to manage the May 25 elections, from which the Russophone East was largely excluded.

Plan A for the Victoria Nuland putsch was probably to install, rapidly, a government in Kiev that would join NATO, thus formally setting the stage for the United States to take possession of Russia’s indispensable Black Sea naval base at Sebastopol in Crimea.  Reincorporating Crimea into Russia was Putin’s necessary defensive move to prevent this.

But the Nuland gambit was in fact a win-win ploy.  If Russia failed to defend itself, it risked losing its entire southern fleet – a total national disaster.  On the other hand, if Russia reacted, as was most likely, the US thereby won a political victory that was perhaps its main objective.  Putin’s totally defensive move is portrayed by the Western mainstream media, echoing political leaders, as unprovoked “Russian expansionism”, which the propaganda machine compares to Hitler grabbing Czechoslovakia and Poland.

Thus a blatant Western provocation, using Ukrainian political confusion against a fundamentally defensive Russia, has astonishingly succeeded in producing a total change in the artificial Zeitgeist produced by Western mass media.  Suddenly, we are told that the “freedom-loving West” is faced with the threat of “aggressive Russian expansionism”.  Some forty years ago, Soviet leaders gave away the store under the illusion that peaceful renunciation on their part could lead to a friendly partnership with the West, and especially with the United States.  But those in the United States who never wanted to end the Cold War are having their revenge.  Never mind “communism”; if, instead of advocating the dictatorship of the proletariat, Russia’s current leader is simply old-fashioned in certain ways, Western media can fabricate a monster out of that.  The United States needs an enemy to save the world from.

The Protection Racket Returns

But first of all, the United States needs Russia as an enemy in order to “save Europe”,  which is another way to say, in order to continue to dominate Europe.  Washington policy-makers seemed to be worried that Obama’s swing to Asia and neglect of Europe might weaken U.S. control of its NATO allies.  The May 25 European Parliament elections revealed a large measure of disaffection with the European Union.  This disaffection, notably in France, is linked to a growing realization that the EU, far from being a potential alternative to the United States, is in reality a mechanism that locks European countries into U.S.-defined globalization, economic decline and U.S. foreign policy, wars and all.

Ukraine is not the only entity that has been overextended.  So has the EU.  With 28 members of diverse language, culture, history and mentality, the EU is unable to agree on any foreign policy other than the one Washington imposes.  The extension of the EU to former Eastern European satellites has totally broken whatever deep consensus might have been possible among the countries of the original Economic Community: France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux states.  Poland and the Baltic States see EU membership as useful, but their hearts are in America – where many of their most influential leaders have been educated and trained.  Washington is able to exploit the anti-communist, anti-Russian and even pro-Nazi nostalgia of northeastern Europe to raise the false cry of “the Russians are coming!” in order to obstruct the growing economic partnership between the old EU, notably Germany, and Russia.

Russia is no threat. But to vociferous Russophobes in the Baltic States, Western Ukraine and Poland, the very existence of Russia is a threat.  Encouraged by the United States and NATO, this endemic hostility is the political basis for the new “iron curtain” meant to achieve the aim spelled out in 1997 by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard: keeping the Eurasian continent divided in order to perpetuate U.S. world hegemony.  The old Cold War served that purpose, cementing U.S. military presence and political influence in Western Europe. A new Cold War can prevent U.S. influence from being diluted by good relations between Western Europe and Russia.

Obama has come to Europe ostentatiously promising to “protect” Europe by basing more troops in regions as close as possible to Russia, while at the same time ordering Russia to withdraw its own troops, on its own territory, still farther away from troubled Ukraine.  This appears designed to humiliate Putin and deprive him of political support at home, at a time when protests are rising in Eastern Ukraine against the Russian leader for abandoning them to killers sent from Kiev.

To tighten the U.S. grip on Europe, the United States is using the artificial crisis to demand that its indebted allies spend more on “defense”, notably by purchasing U.S. weapons systems. Although the U.S. is still far from being able to meet Europe’s energy needs from the new U.S. fracking boom, this prospect is being hailed as a substitute for Russia’s natural gas sales  – stigmatized as a “way of exercising political pressure”, something of which hypothetic U.S. energy sales are presumed to be innocent.  Pressure is being brought against Bulgaria and even Serbia to block construction of the South Stream pipeline that would bring Russian gas into the Balkans and southern Europe.

From D-Day to Dooms Day

Today, June 6, the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landing is being played in Normandy as a gigantic celebration of American domination, with Obama heading an all-star cast of European leaders. The last of the aged surviving soldiers and aviators present are like the ghosts of a more innocent age when the United States was only at the start of its new career as world master. They were real, but the rest is a charade.  French television is awash with the tears of young villagers in Normandy who have been taught that the United States is some sort of Guardian Angel, which sent its boys to die on the shores of Normandy out of pure love for France. This idealized image of the past is implicitly projected on the future.  In seventy years, the Cold War, a dominant propaganda narrative and above all Hollywood have convinced the French, and most of the West, that D-Day was the turning point that won World War II and saved Europe from Nazi Germany.

Vladimir Putin came to the celebration, and has been elaborately shunned by Obama, self-appointed arbiter of Virtue.  The Russians are paying tribute to the D-Day operation which liberated France from Nazi occupation, but they – and historians – know what most of the West has forgotten: that the Wehrmacht was decisively defeated not by the Normandy landing, but by the Red Army.  If the vast bulk of German forces had not been pinned down fighting a losing war on the Eastern front, nobody would celebrate D-Day as it is being celebrated today.

Putin is widely credited as being “the best chess player”, who won the first round of the Ukrainian crisis.  He has no doubt done the best he could, faced with the crisis foisted on him.  But the U.S. has whole ranks of pawns which Putin does not have. And this is not only a chess game, but chess combined with poker combined with Russian roulette. The United States is ready to take risks that the more prudent Russian leaders prefer to avoid… as long as possible.

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the current charade is the servility of the “old” Europeans.  Apparently abandoning all Europe’s accumulated wisdom, drawn from its wars and tragedies, and even oblivious to their own best interests, today’s European leaders seem ready to follow their American protectors to another D-Day … D for Doom.

Can the presence of a peace-seeking Russian leader in Normandy make a difference?  All it would take would be for mass media to tell the truth, and for Europe to produce reasonably wise and courageous leaders, for the whole fake war machine to lose its luster, and for truth to begin to dawn. A peaceful Europe is still possible, but for how long?

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. She can be reached at diana.johnstone at wanadoo.fr  


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